Partner programs represent the different types of relationships sales organizations can have with their partners. By segmenting their partners by tiers and setting up a system of benefits, partner programs can be used to distinguish and reward partners based on their performance and their contribution.
Using partner programs is optional though. It is perfectly possible to implement Partner Relationship Management without using partner programs, but it is a great tool to keep track of your partner relations and allows for all kinds of interesting partner reporting.
Benefits
Benefits can be awarded to partners on their enrollment in partner programs. Before we can use benefits, they off course need to be defined first in what you could call a benefits catalog.
Benefits are optional though and if use in the context of a partner program, only the commitment of the benefit is documented here. Implementing the benefit in whatever system needs the information is a separate thing.
Notice how each benefit has a value type. The value type will determine how the benefit can be linked to a program or a program tier.
Tiers
Partners can be segmented by tiers. Using tiers when defining partners is optional, but when done so, within a partner program different benefits can be awarded to different tiers of partners within the same program.
These tiers need to be setup first though before they can be used as partner classification or within programs.
Notice how a badge image can be linked to a tier. This image will be shown on the partner overview pages.
Partner Programs
Once benefits and tiers have been defined, we can start creating partner programs.
Partner programs document the agreed relationship between a sales organization and its partners. They can optionally reward these partners with benefits, or reward them with benefits per tier as mentioned above.
In the image below you can clearly see how within a program, for different tiers, the same benefit with a different value is awarded to enrolled partners. This is the purpose of the benefit value types that were mentioned above.
Enrollments
Once programs have been published, channel managers can enroll partners. An enrollment is like a membership agreement to a partner program.
Through an approval process, both the channel organization and the partner can officially agree upon the program enrollment details. Once the enrollment official, partners can work towards earning the benefits that correspond to their tiers.
Channel managers can keep track of all program enrollments and their different approval statuses.
They can see the enrollments for each program individually.
